


Under These Conditions

by NotQuiteHumanAnymore



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse), X-Men - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, This turned into maximoff family feels and Idk how I feel about that
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-28
Updated: 2016-07-28
Packaged: 2018-07-27 05:52:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,140
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7606192
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NotQuiteHumanAnymore/pseuds/NotQuiteHumanAnymore
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>idk, XMA Pietro and his struggle with kleptomania</p>
    </blockquote>





	Under These Conditions

**Author's Note:**

> idk, XMA Pietro and his struggle with kleptomania

When Pietro Maximoff was thirteen years old, the world started to slow down. He couldn't make it stop, and he couldn't figure out how to control it.

Suddenly it felt like there was too much time. The people around him moved ever more slowly as time went on.

Every morning he woke up praying that it was some sort of dream, or a nightmare and every day he found himself having to focus harder and harder on what people around him were saying.

And then, one day, like a rubber band snapping back into place, the world woke up. Pietro couldn't stop the tears that came when he saw Wanda moving at a speed that matched his own, and their mother found Wanda curled around him thirty minutes later, Pietro speaking as fast as Wanda could understand, trying to explain before everything went back to being all wrong.

Their mother pulled them from school that day and told them about their father. Not Django, who had helped her raise them and build a life in the American Midwest, but a man whose blood was magic.

There were many people like him, she said, and she had given them a place to stay a while on their travels. There was a man who could blink his eyes and be in another place, a woman who could change her form at will, another girl with wings like those of a fairy, a man who could control metal with his mind.

She didn't say who their father was. She refused to say anything else about it, but she told Pietro that she had likely inherited more of their fathers blood than hers, and that what Pietro spoke of was, undoubtedly, his own transformation beginning.

He didn’t believe her. How could he, when all he had was her word?

He was only thirteen years old. He was supposed to be worrying about grades, or acne at the most.

He was thirteen years old, and there was too much time in the world.

The first time he stole something, it was because he wanted to see if anyone would notice, would stop him. He wanted to see if there was any validity to his mother’s claims that something bigger than his perception of time was happening. The clerk was looking right at him as he put the candy bar in his pocket. He waited to be stopped, for someone to call him a thief and run after him.

No one did.

He felt bad about it as soon as he’d done it, but the second the door to the shop closed behind him, time snapped back to normal. The cars on the road next to him raced by at speeds faster than he could focus on.

His heart slowed and for the first time in months, he felt hopeful.

When Pietro Maximoff is thirteen, he asks his mother to stop calling him Pietro. He lies, tells her that no one can pronounce his name and it's irritating on a good day. He looks away from the hurt in her eyes and sees his sister in the doorway. Her gaze isn't accusatory, it's not angry, but he can see that she knows the real reason.

He's not Pietro Maximoff anymore. He isn't sure he ever will be again.

 

By the time he turns fourteen, he’s begun to realize that his mother was right about him having abilities beyond the normal human range. He’s heard about “mutants” now and again, and realized that the people with “magic blood” that his mother had mentioned were of that same vein of humanity. Magic was her way of relating it to a thirteen year old without telling him that his entire life was based around science that hadn’t been rationalized yet.

By the time he’s turned fourteen he’s figured out that focusing his abilities is what helps him control how fast time goes by. Stealing is what helps him focus his speed, but he also doesn’t care for the guilt that comes with it. His mother does what she can to try and focus his energy in other ways, but Pietro can see that she doesn’t really understand, and that it hurts her that there is this side to her son that she will never truly be able to relate to.

But somehow, miracle of miracles, Wanda does.

She’s always been better at understanding him when no one else could, and she can see the guilt in his eyes. She suggests returning the items he steals as well, but that only works some of the time. When it doesn’t work, everything falls into half speed or worse and he has to wait for things to focus again naturally.

Instead of telling him to stop, she helps him set up rules.

Rule one: No stealing from places of worship. Instinctively grabbing something from the entrance to their Synagogue led to guilt worse than the risk of time slowing down on him. He returned it, no one noticed except Wanda, but that became rule one.

Rule two: No theft of intellectual property. He, more than anyone, knows the value of time, and knowing how much time goes into creating something like a record is something that deserves to be paid for.

Rule Three: Always, _always_ , make sure that you get caught. Not enough to not get away with it, but enough that no one else will get blamed.

The rules keep him stable. They keep him from going too far.

For a while, he can breathe. He's got his mother, who understands. Django isn't sure he gets it, and Ana is too little to know anything other than her brother is different, but they're there for him. To top that off, he's got Wanda, who can slow him down just by being there. If he starts to panic or the world starts to slow, she can always tell. Even when she can't calm him down or bring him back, she's there when things go back to normal.

Until she isn't.

 

On the day Wanda's powers develop, Pietro's hair turns silver.

He thought it was a prank at first, Ana and Wanda teaming up to pull one over on him when he's sleeping, but they were too surprised when he came into view.

But when Wanda's powers took out the school gym and threw everyone in a thirty foot radius into an inexplicable coma for a week, Pietro realized what it had to mean.

They'd always been connected, but now it was more like the twin telepathy idea everyone teased them about.

He got a pinch of her fear as the side of the building crumbled and was there to watch everyone but her fall straight to sleep.

 

The week before he and Wanda turn fifteen, things are starting to look back up for them. Pietro's powers are easier to control, and Wanda has given him an early birthday present. She rewired a Pac-Man machine the arcade was throwing away so that it worked with his speed. It gave him something to focus on that wasn't stealing, and she'd used it as a practical application of her powers, manipulating the circuits inside to do what she wanted them to.

He knows she isn't sure why she gave it to him early, something unsettling closes in on her face whenever he asks, but he's glad that they're finally starting to find their way to a new normal again.

The week before he and Wanda turn fifteen, they're caught in the crossfire of some kind of riot. He, Django, and Wanda get separated from their mother and Ana.

Someone, somewhere fires a gun. It hits their stepfather and leaves him lying in the street beside them.

The world slows down enough that Pietro sees the exact moment Wanda loses control of her powers, but it doesn't slow down enough for him to do something about it.

He reaches Wanda in time for her to form her first hex bolt.

The world snaps back to normal, but he doesn't wake up for a month.

 

When he does wake up, he's miserable.

Django never recovered from the bullet, and Wanda won't even leave her room.

On the rare occasions they're in the same place at the same time, she never looks at him, or he’ll catch her staring at the scar that's barely visible against his collarbone, tears threatening at the corners of her eyes.

When he tries to comfort her, tell her it's not her fault, that they're siblings so they have to get past this together, that she's all he's got she pushes him away. She'll retreat into herself, or lash out so he'll get angry enough to leave.

She thinks she's protecting him. He knows that, he can feel it, but he also knows that it wasn't her fault.

He starts slipping again, losing control, stealing again.

He keeps a sheet of paper with their Rules on them stuck to a dartboard, to the back of the Pac-Man machine, the top of the television set.

He still follows them. She's still his sister, and he's added another rule: find a way to reach her again.

That one is non-negotiable.

He's gotten damn good at stealing again, sometimes going into places and leaving again in the same second.

That's when Professor Charles Xavier knocks on his door. He's slipped into his own time, the slowest it's gotten yet, and has gone through their entire car (someone really likes to smoke), a briefcase  (someone has a capital-i _Issue_ with whatever drug was in that bottle because he counted at least seventeen needles with the syringe), and that wolfy looking guys pockets (he takes the guys lighter, because smoking those cigars is gonna kill him) before they even hit the front door.

It's his personal best.

A part of him still wants to tell Wanda.

He accepts a high five from Ana instead on his way to the basement.

He hardly listens to their spiel, trying to think of a way to bug Wanda into being his sister again, but that guy has claws (okay, ew.)! He saw the claws cut through the skin and muscle on his knuckles in slow motion because he was focusing a little too hard on too many things, and also because the claws don't look like claws. They're bone. Actual _bone,_ coming out of the guys skin! Cool but he couldn't help but wonder what would happen if the bone, like, got broken. How would it heal? You can't put a cast on claws, my man.) He almost says all of this, but they need something from him, and Pietro isn't about to pass up an opportunity if it means he gets out of this house of misery for a while.

At that point, breaking into the Pentagon is just the icing on the cake.

 

He drives back slowly, taking in the scenery and knowing that something major in his life just changed forever.

Something about breaking into the Pentagon, the most heavily guarded building on the planet steadied him out. He's still running on that adrenaline rush, but he knows that that isn't everything.

It isn't just that the world has stayed steady for him since he left the house, it's something that his mother said to him years ago. Something he knows he's missing.

_My mom once knew a guy who could do that._

When he finally gets home, his mother is watching the news coverage with a stricken look on her face, and for the first time in ages, Wanda is waiting for him when he gets inside.

“You broke Magneto out of prison?” She asks him, voice hushed so that it won't carry to where their mother is sitting.

 _It's not one of the rules._ Is his first instinct, but he also knows that if he gets defensive, if he says even part of the wrong thing, she'll retreat again, and he cannot let that happen.

He nods. It seems safest.

“How-” She pauses, as if this was suddenly uncertain terrain, speaking to her own brother. “How do you feel?” Pietro slowly lets the grin he's been holding back slip onto his face. She may have forgotten how they communicate but he hasn't.

“It was such a rush, Wands. I feel amazing.”

Slowly, so slowly that he thinks he may have been wrong anyway, she smiles too.

 

He doesn't stop stealing, because sometimes things get a little too slow and he gets a little too desperate, but it slows enough to be more than manageable.

The next time he and Wanda separate, it's because she goes to Europe for school.

The next time he goes after Magneto, he knows the truth. He isn't alone, this time, and he's the furthest from losing control that he's ever been.

 

**Author's Note:**

> I write other stuff over on tumblr @scarletwix


End file.
